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Is Discord really using 2GB of RAM for you? Can you clarify what you mean by regularly? Discord (including all of its helper processes) is only using 190 MB of

Is Discord really using 2GB of RAM for you? Can you clarify what you mean by regularly? Discord (including all of its helper processes) is only using 190 MB of RAM for me at the moment.

nottorp 8y ago
The screenshot below was a particularly bad day... but Discord, Skype and Slack (all javascript "applications") compete continously for eating more ram than my actual work stuff. https://imgur.com/a/NrNTDop https://imgur.com/a/NrNTDop Edit: for those who don't want to click, it's a screnshot of the os x activity monitor showing the worst memory consumption, in order: Discord Helper 1.98 Gb, kernel_task 1.67 Gb, Skype Helper 1.58 Gb, Slack 1.20 Gb :)
- Klonoar 8y ago
  This is getting really, really old. Modern RAM doesn't work the way people who complain about Slack/et al think it does. The operating system will cull it from other places when it needs it; even a native Cocoa app will not dump memory you're done with until the system decides it needs it for something else, because on the off-chance your app ends up needing it again, it's already allocated. "purge" exists for a reason. It's like when you pull up a StackOverflow answer for "how can I judge how much memory usage my process has?", and the top voted answer is some bash script to determine peak ps, when every other answer tries to explain that that's only one measure of memory and isn't even totally accurate. Furthermore, that nice feature of most modern apps where you're scrolling up rapidly and an image is nice and ready to present? Images are big, especially when we all use retina displays. They take up memory. There was a blog post that went on HN a few months ago but didn't seem to make the front page, wherein the author determined that forcing Electron to dump image cache junk lowers the memory usage substantially. Could Electron & co do better? For sure. Loading an entire browser for a UI does kind of suck. But stop acting like all the stuff that the browser does for you _for free_ is or should be zero-cost. End rant, I guess.
  - nottorp 8y ago
    If the memory consumption of a process grows from 200 M (which is about what the chat apps use when freshly started) to 2 Gb, something is rotten by any metric. The system was responding slowly when I made that screenshot because it started using swap. Which got instafreed the moment i restarted the memory hogs. If i don't restart the machine for a year, is the pretty chat app going to keep in ram, uncompressed, all the cat pictures that people posted in the last 12 months then? Do you think that's sane?
    - mbell 8y ago
      > If the memory consumption of a process grows from 200 M (which is about what the chat apps use when freshly started) to 2 Gb, something is rotten by any metric. That is just not how memory works anymore, at least not how the OS reports it to you. > The system was responding slowly when I made that screenshot because it started using swap. How did you determine this? If you're looking at swap usage in activity monitor, this is also not an accurate metric. I'm sitting here with 14GB used, 18GB free and 2GB of swap usage. Using swap does _not_ mean you are out of ram, it just doesn't work like that. Is the memory pressure graph in activity monitor yellow or red? If not, which is likely the case, you don't have memory issues. You don't need more memory and it doesn't matter how much memory your applications are using.
      - nottorp 8y ago
        Quit it. It was 32 Gb used (i.e. all of it, maybe 1-2 G left for cache) plus 5-6 G of swap. I don't know how your OS X works, but mine tends to not go into swap before running out of ram. It does not come out of swap when ram is freed indeed, but when you freshly boot it it will stay at swap used: 0 bytes until someone posts too many cat pictures in Slack or Discord. Or until i forget how many VMs I opened, but that's work and actually useful. Edit: I can't reply to your reply because HN doesn't like so many indents. I also don't want to continue a flame war about observed behaviour vs the theory of shared libraries and memory mapped files etc so I'll stop here.
        8y ago
- plq 8y ago
  When you calculate the sum of the so-called "memory consumption" of all processes, you generally end up with a number ridiculously above your the amount of physical memory installed on your box. The only reliable way to learn the memory consumption of a process is to somehow make sure other processes don't allocate/deallocate memory, kill the process in question and watch the difference in global memory consumption.
  - Yizahi 8y ago
    On my windows 7 I just calculated sum for all processes and I got exactly the same number as displayed for RAM used on Performance tab. For anyone interested to repeat it fast, run this in powershell: Get-Process | Format-Table WorkingSet > c:\data.txt Import contents in excel and sum all cells.

Is Discord really using 2GB of RAM for you? Can you clarify what you mean by regularly? Discord (including all of its helper processes) is only using 190 MB of RAM for me at the moment.

nottorp 8y ago

The screenshot below was a particularly bad day... but Discord, Skype and Slack (all javascript "applications") compete continously for eating more ram than my actual work stuff. https://imgur.com/a/NrNTDop https://imgur.com/a/NrNTDop Edit: for those who don't want to click, it's a screnshot of the os x activity monitor showing the worst memory consumption, in order: Discord Helper 1.98 Gb, kernel_task 1.67 Gb, Skype Helper 1.58 Gb, Slack 1.20 Gb :)

Klonoar 8y ago
This is getting really, really old. Modern RAM doesn't work the way people who complain about Slack/et al think it does. The operating system will cull it from other places when it needs it; even a native Cocoa app will not dump memory you're done with until the system decides it needs it for something else, because on the off-chance your app ends up needing it again, it's already allocated. "purge" exists for a reason. It's like when you pull up a StackOverflow answer for "how can I judge how much memory usage my process has?", and the top voted answer is some bash script to determine peak ps, when every other answer tries to explain that that's only one measure of memory and isn't even totally accurate. Furthermore, that nice feature of most modern apps where you're scrolling up rapidly and an image is nice and ready to present? Images are big, especially when we all use retina displays. They take up memory. There was a blog post that went on HN a few months ago but didn't seem to make the front page, wherein the author determined that forcing Electron to dump image cache junk lowers the memory usage substantially. Could Electron & co do better? For sure. Loading an entire browser for a UI does kind of suck. But stop acting like all the stuff that the browser does for you _for free_ is or should be zero-cost. End rant, I guess.
- nottorp 8y ago
  If the memory consumption of a process grows from 200 M (which is about what the chat apps use when freshly started) to 2 Gb, something is rotten by any metric. The system was responding slowly when I made that screenshot because it started using swap. Which got instafreed the moment i restarted the memory hogs. If i don't restart the machine for a year, is the pretty chat app going to keep in ram, uncompressed, all the cat pictures that people posted in the last 12 months then? Do you think that's sane?
  - mbell 8y ago
    > If the memory consumption of a process grows from 200 M (which is about what the chat apps use when freshly started) to 2 Gb, something is rotten by any metric. That is just not how memory works anymore, at least not how the OS reports it to you. > The system was responding slowly when I made that screenshot because it started using swap. How did you determine this? If you're looking at swap usage in activity monitor, this is also not an accurate metric. I'm sitting here with 14GB used, 18GB free and 2GB of swap usage. Using swap does _not_ mean you are out of ram, it just doesn't work like that. Is the memory pressure graph in activity monitor yellow or red? If not, which is likely the case, you don't have memory issues. You don't need more memory and it doesn't matter how much memory your applications are using.
    - nottorp 8y ago
      Quit it. It was 32 Gb used (i.e. all of it, maybe 1-2 G left for cache) plus 5-6 G of swap. I don't know how your OS X works, but mine tends to not go into swap before running out of ram. It does not come out of swap when ram is freed indeed, but when you freshly boot it it will stay at swap used: 0 bytes until someone posts too many cat pictures in Slack or Discord. Or until i forget how many VMs I opened, but that's work and actually useful. Edit: I can't reply to your reply because HN doesn't like so many indents. I also don't want to continue a flame war about observed behaviour vs the theory of shared libraries and memory mapped files etc so I'll stop here.
      - 8y ago
plq 8y ago
When you calculate the sum of the so-called "memory consumption" of all processes, you generally end up with a number ridiculously above your the amount of physical memory installed on your box. The only reliable way to learn the memory consumption of a process is to somehow make sure other processes don't allocate/deallocate memory, kill the process in question and watch the difference in global memory consumption.
- Yizahi 8y ago
  On my windows 7 I just calculated sum for all processes and I got exactly the same number as displayed for RAM used on Performance tab. For anyone interested to repeat it fast, run this in powershell: Get-Process | Format-Table WorkingSet > c:\data.txt Import contents in excel and sum all cells.